1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document link description method, a document link generating apparatus, and a computer program product, that realize a plurality of document links by describing one abstract link.
2. Discussion of the Background
In the present specification, an electronic document edited and created on a computer and stored in a storage medium is referred to as a document. Generally, documents, not only paper documents but also electronic documents, contain information having an internal structure, such as, for example, a hierarchical structure constituted by logical elements, such as, chapters and verses. In a hypertext document description language, such as a SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), an XML (Extensible Markup Language), or a HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), each logical element is expressed by a tag. Particularly, in the XML, a peculiar document type (i.e., a document structure rule) can be easily defined for each document class, and further, recognition of the document structure and extraction of the document information can be easily realized by a document processing program.
In a hypertext document, information for linking a document to another document is described within each document using one of the above-described document description languages. A user can refer to and read related information in a plurality of documents using a browser that has a function to update the display of a computer to a linking destination document from the displayed document.
Conventionally, when defining a document link in a hypertext document description language, such as the XML or the HTML, the location information of a document element desired to be linked, such as the location of a file of a document including the document element, the name of the document element, and the structural position of the document element in the document, is described at a link source document element. That is, such location information of a linking destination is described for each link.
For example, when defining a link for a technical term in a document to a description sentence in a technical term dictionary, the location information of the linking destination (i.e., the name of the dictionary and the position of the technical term in the dictionary) must be described for each appearance of the technical term in the document. This creates a problem that repetitive operations for describing the linking information are necessary for a document and also creates a problem that the size of the document is increased because of the added linking information. In addition, when the document at the linking destination is changed, for example when the structure or the location of the document is changed, the description of the linking information has to be changed accordingly, which is also troublesome.